World’s First All-Wireless Small Cell - The Sprint Magic Box

May 8, 2017

Sprint has unveiled the Sprint Magic Box. The Sprint Magic Box is a revolutionary new plug-and-play LTE small cell for businesses and consumers that dramatically improves data coverage and increases download and upload speeds on average by 200 percent. The breakthrough new technology allows Sprint to very quickly and cost-effectively densify its nationwide LTE Plus network, and provide an improved experience for its millions of customers today and in the future.

The Sprint Magic Box is an indoor, self-configuring small cell, about the size of a shoebox, that is easy for customers to install. It requires no implementation, labor, or rental costs that are a hurdle for many traditional small cell deployments. The unit is simply placed near a window and plugged into a power outlet. It connects to a nearby Sprint cell site and within minutes is up and running. Customers immediately have a better experience inside their businesses and homes while streaming videos, surfing the web, and using their favorite online apps and services.

Sprint designed the Sprint Magic Box so that customers in surrounding areas will also enjoy the benefits of the locally installed unit. One Sprint Magic Box provides average coverage of 30,000 square feet indoors and can benefit adjacent Sprint customers inside the building. The signal can also extend coverage 100 meters outside a building, benefitting Sprint customers in nearby buildings and improving street-level network performance.

Sprint Magic Box greatly accelerates Sprint’s strategy to densify its network as it improves performance and builds a strong foundation for 5G. It uses Sprint’s ample, dedicated 2.5 GHz spectrum with backhaul provided by Sprint’s outdoor macro cell sites. This removes the cost of backhaul, along with many of the challenges typically associated with small cell deployments, providing a low-cost, effective way to make the Sprint network - already performing at its best-ever-levels - even better for customers.

This small cell deployment has begun in several cities across the country such as Denver, San Francisco, Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and Houston. In the past three months downloads speeds across these markets have significantly improved as Sprint rolled-out its toolkit of densification technologies such as Sprint Magic Box, outdoor small cells, three-channel carrier aggregation, and launched iconic new High Performance User Equipment (HPUE) smartphones. Click here to learn more.